Re-interpreting meanings

After I made my last breakup post, siderea left me with some excellent thoughts about it. While there were a lot of good points, these were the parts that resonated the most. She started by describing the reaction that many people have to her:

… a lot of people, male, female and otherwise, fall “in like” with me very quickly, because for a lot of them, I “make” them feel good – put more accurately, the way I comport myself in the world is more comfortable to be around than they usually find themselves feeling. They feel – like you describe feeling for the woman you fell for – safe from humiliation or rejection when self-disclosing to me, like they can be more authentically themselves, which is a delicious feeling.

Here’s the first confusion: confusing how they feel with me for how they feel about me. It is one of the commonest human errors to decide that because one feels good with someone that they are good.

This is problematic first and most obviously because it’s how serial predators of all sorts groom victims: making the victims feel good so that the victims trust the perp to be good. Not pertinent to your case, except to bear in mind how dangerous an error that can be.

Less obvious and more pertinent is how that conflation confuses the one doing the conflating as to how much they actually know about the one they are so judging. The confusion of one’s own good feelings for the goodness of the person one attributes those good feelings to obscures what is often a concommitant fact: one doesn’t actually know much about the person who makes one feel good, except that they make one feel good. […]

You say, “What was so special was the almost instant feeling of connection” as if that feeling existed independently of any one specific human to have it. Feelings aren’t facts: that feeling of connection was had by you. It was a feeling you were having. That doesn’t mean there “was a connection” in some objective way. Further, saying that the feeling you had was “of connection” is just a projection of a meaning those feelings had. The words “a feeling of connection” don’t actually have any meaning. They’re a handwave that posits that the feelings – which probably all have names, like “adoration”, “pleasure”, “affection”, “delight”, “surprise” – indicate this hazy concept, “connection”.

Some of the main lessons I took away from this comment:

Part of my pain was in the feeling that I’d had a unique, almost mystical “connection” with someone, that we’d then lost. But as siderea pointed out, “a connection” doesn’t actually mean anything: it was just a way how I interpreted the feelings I had in the presence of my ex, as well as the feelings that I thought she had in my presence.

Going from “there was a unique and magical connection” to “there was a person who happened to fall into some kind of mental schema of a ‘safe person’ based on relatively superficial information, and thus made me feel safe, and at some moments there seemed to be mutuality in this” changes one’s perspective a lot.

For one, I had been feeling like it was a personal failure, telling of some deeper fundamental flaw in me, that I had screwed things up and “ruined” that connection. With the new perspective, it’s more like… Well, there were some moments when those feelings arose and others when they didn’t, and that had more to do with the quirks of our individual psychologies than anything else.

And as several people commenting on my last post implied, my side of the “connection” being primarily an emotion that *I* had suggests that recapturing that feeling doesn’t necessarily require finding someone who’s magical and rare and unique in some sense. Rather, it may be much more useful to just work on myself and my own emotions, to make it easier for me to achieve that feeling around people in general. (to use psych terms, this is a major inwards shift of the locus of control)

In the few days after reading siderea’s comment, painful memories of various kinds about this relationship kept popping up. It wasn’t very pleasant, but at the same time there was a sense of… my mind pulling up those memories so that it could reinterpret the meaning it had given them, and to then reconsolidate the version of the memory with the updated meaning.

Yesterday evening I noticed that I was feeling much less of an urge to go back and “make things right again”, but I still had a compelling need to have my ex think well of me, to fix any respect that might have been lost.

I asked myself: why do I feel that this is so important? It made sense to have this desire back when there was still a chance to fix our relationship, but what would fulfilling that desire do now?

No answer came back. Instead, the feeling seemed to weaken.

This night I had a dream where I was hanging out with my ex, and completely forgetting to think about what she thought of me, just getting absorbed in whatever activity it was that we were doing together.

And today I’ve been feeling pretty okay about that whole relationship and breakup thing.

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Kaj Sotala:
Every now and then one sees accusations of plagiarism, in e.g. design: frequently, the evidence is just "these two designs are way too similar for it to be chance", based on an appeal to common sense. And yes, no doubt many of the accusations are correct, and it was indeed a case of plagiarism.

But those news always make me wonder - in a world with almost 8 billion people, how complicated and similar do any two designs have to be before we can be sure that it was indeed plagiarism? With this many people, it would be surprising if people working independently and with no knowledge of each other didn't ever accidentally create designs that looked "too similar for it to be an accident". (especially since different designers aren't developing their designs purely at random, but are rather working under similar constraints and goals)

With design, if that happens, then we might never be able to say for sure whether it was independent creation or whether someone did plagiarize from the other. Now this article's example of something that would also feel too implausible for it to be chance, if we didn't have evidence to the contrary, is from photography. There, enough information did exist in the two photos that the two people who took them could verify that they were indeed different shots. But the next time that I see a side-by-side comparison of two designs, one of them claimed to be a plagiarism of the other, I'm probably going to think "yeah, those two do look so similar that one of them has to be stolen... but that's what I would have thought of those lighthouse shots too."

>... there was one comment that mentioned that I had stolen the image from another New England photographer, Eric Gendon. After letting the commenter know that it was indeed my image and that I possess the original RAW file, I headed over to the other photographers page and was blown away. We had what looked like the exact same image, taken at the exact millisecond in time, from what looked like the same exact location and perspective.How Two Photographers Unknowingly Shot the Same Millisecond in Time

Kaj Sotala:
In the Star Trek universe, we are told that it's really hard to make genuine artificial intelligence, and that Data is so special because he's a rare example of someone having managed to create one.

But this doesn't seem to be the best hypothesis for explaining the evidence that we've actually seen. Consider:

- In the TOS episode "The Ultimate Computer", the Federation has managed to build a computer intelligent enough to run the Enterprise by its own, but it goes crazy and Kirk has to talk it into self-destructing.- In TNG, we find out that before Data, Doctor Noonian Soong had built Lore, an android with sophisticated emotional processing. However, Lore became essentially evil and had no problems killing people for his own benefit. Data worked better, but in order to get his behavior right, Soong had to initially build him with no emotions at all. (TNG: "Datalore", "Brothers")- In the TNG episode "Evolution", Wesley is doing a science project with nanotechnology, accidentally enabling the nanites to become a collective intelligence which almost takes over the ship before the crew manages to negotiate a peaceful solution with them.- The holodeck seems entirely capable of running generally intelligent characters, though their behavior is usually restricted to specific roles. However, on occasion they have started straying outside their normal parameters, to the point of attempting taking over the ship. (TNG: "Elementary, Dear Data") It is also suggested that the computer is capable of running an indefinitely long simulation which is good enough to make an intelligent being believe in it being the real universe. (TNG: "Ship in a Bottle")- The ship's computer in most of the series seems like it's potentially quite intelligent, but most of the intelligence isn't used for anything else than running holographic characters. - In the TNG episode "Booby Trap", a potential way of saving the Enterprise from the Disaster Of The Week would involve turning over control of the ship to the computer: however, the characters are inexplicably super-reluctant to do this.- In Voyager, the Emergency Medical Hologram clearly has general intelligence: however, it is only supposed to be used in emergency situations rather than running long-term, its memory starting to degrade after a sufficiently long time of continuous use. The recommended solution is to reset it, removing all of the accumulated memories since its first activation. (VOY: "The Swarm")

There seems to be a pattern here: if an AI is built to carry out a relatively restricted role, then things work fine. However, once it is given broad autonomy and it gets to do open-ended learning, there's a very high chance that it gets out of control. The Federation witnessed this for the first time with the Ultimate Computer. Since then, they have been ensuring that all of their AI systems are restricted to narrow tasks or that they'll only run for a short time in an emergency, to avoid things getting out of hand. Of course, this doesn't change the fact that your AI having more intelligence is generally useful, so e.g. starship computers are equipped with powerful general intelligence capabilities, which sometimes do get out of hand.

Soong's achievement with Data was not in building a general intelligence, but in building a general intelligence which didn't go crazy. (And before Data, he failed at that task once, with Lore.)

The original design for the game didn't have warfare, diplomacy, or technological advancement; all of that was added as the design was iterated on:

> Like Railroad Tycoon before it, Civilization was born out of Meier’s abiding fascination with SimCity. [...] Railroad Tycoon had attempted to take some of the appeal of SimCity and “gameify” it by adding computerized opponents and a concrete ending date. It had succeeded magnificently on those terms, but Meier wasn’t done building on what Wright had wrought. In fact, his first conception of Civilization cast it as a much more obvious heir to SimCity than even Railroad Tycoon had been. Whereas SimCity had let the player build her own functioning city, Civilization would let her build a whole network of them, forming a country — or, as the game’s name would imply, a civilization.

To think, most 4X games today, they tend to just copy Civ’s basic formula, including elements like the city-building, warfare, diplomacy, technology…

And then the guys making the first Civ had no idea that this would become a genre, just putting together systems that seemed to make sense to them. If they hadn’t thought of the technology idea, for instance, would anyone else have come up with it? Today, it feels like such an obvious idea that surely someone would eventually have made a game that also had you developing technology throughout the ages… but would they have?» The Game of Everything, Part 1: Making Civilization The Digital Antiquarian

> If someone says “in Rotherham the police ignored evidence that these people were assaulting children, for politically motivated reasons”, then if I’m responsible I will go check how often the police ignore evidence that people are assaulting children for absolutely no reason at all and eventually I will probably conclude that police just frequently ignore evidence of serious crimes.

> I have encountered communities where everyone constantly talked at Rotherham in exhausting detail but they had absolutely no idea about any of the other cases I mentioned.

> I mean that. They just had no idea. You ask them “can you name a csa case where there isn’t evidence that the police could have acted ten years sooner than they did?” and they are genuinely surprised that in the case of Larry Nassar, in the case of Jerry Sandusky, in the case of Jimmy Saville, in the case of Catholic clergy, the police could have acted ten years earlier and didn’t. They’ve heard about Rotherham, and only Rotherham, and because their sources were so carefully selective in which horrible things they let their readers learn of, the readers end up thinking that something uniquely went wrong in Rotherham, instead of realizing that police just don’t actually typically do anything about evidence of sexual abuse of children until years and sometimes decades after they could have.

> As far as I can tell, in every single csa scandal that is uncovered, there’s abundant evidence that it could have been uncovered a lot sooner, and the police got reports and failed to act. This seems to be very nearly universal. I’m not sure why it’s true. I find it disturbing that it’s true. The fact that so many people cover up sexual assault of children is something that has caused me to seriously ask myself “am I the kind of person who would do that? Why not? Those people would presumably have answered that question ‘of course not’, and they were wrong, so how do I make sure I’m not wrong?” And I think it’s a good idea for other people to ask themselves that too! But the people who talk endlessly in horrifying detail about Rotherham and are totally clueless that this is a general feature of sexual abuse cases…. they’re working from a disastrously bad model of the world, and I am pretty sure that a lot of sexual abuse might pass them by because they’ve managed to end up with such a wrong and distorted impression of what the problem is. (If you think the problem is “political correctness”, of course you fight political correctness. If it turns out that actually, near-universally police do not act on these accusations, that points to a completely different solution and all of your political-correctness fighting is actively worse than useless.) Re the TERF thing, I think you underestimate the...

Kaj Sotala:
> ... we hypothesized that extreme forms of music such as heavy metal, which is associated with antisocial behavior, irreligiosity, and deviation from the norm is less prevalent in the regions with higher prevalence of pathogenic stress. [...] Results showed that parasite stress negatively predicts the number of heavy metal bands. However, no relationship was found between the intensity of the music and parasite stress.